Jolt Awards: Utilities

Andrew Binstock- Mike Riley- Rick Wayne- and Gary Evans, July 24, 2012 The Jolt judges combed through more than 40 products to find the very best developer utilities. We now reveal the Jolt Award winner and the runners-up.

I have been an avid user of Tower from its initial release. Since then, developer fournova has been keeping busy with free feature upgrades and bug fixes that arrive every month or so via its built-in version checker. For the uninitiated, Tower is a Git client with a beautifully rendered user interface. Instead of dealing with the dozens of special Git cases and switches on the command line, Tower makes executing and visualizing code check-ins, branch creation/tracking, and managing multiple Git repositories on a variety of servers a breeze. Tower natively supports popular public Git services such as Github and Beanstalk. I'm hoping fournova will also be adding out-of-the-box support for Gitosis and SourceForge in a future update. That said, it's easy enough to add these and other public and private Git hosts to Tower via the application's repository wizard. Most of all, Tower brings other, less-technical code contributors (graphic designers, project managers, etc.) into the party by allowing others to easily see and interact with the code check-ins while benefiting from all the outstanding distributed source version-control features that Git has to offer. For a more comprehensive review of Tower, check out my earlier fournova review on Dr. Dobb's.

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